Читать книгу Stella - Emeric Bergeaud - Страница 18

Several years of work, often interrupted, have brought me to the conclusion of a piece that owes most of its creation to imagination. In it, I have tried to emphasize some of the most beautiful features of our national history. By wrapping these events in the vestments of fiction, my intention was to add nothing: that which is beautiful needs no embellishment. I simply wanted to capture, through the attraction of the novel, the minds of those who do not subject themselves to in-depth study of our annals.

A novel, without possessing the strict seriousness of history, can be a useful book: this is what I thought in embarking on this enterprise that long occupied my hours of leisure. May it answer the goodness of my designs!

Yet to produce some good, this book was to be a novel only in form. The truth had to be found in it. This is why I have taken pains not to disfigure history.

The Revolution in Saint-Domingue, a laborious birthing of a new society, gave rise to four men who personify its excesses and its glories: Rigaud, Toussaint, Dessalines, Pétion. I have borrowed from the lives of these men details necessary to complete the story of the two brothers who, properly speaking, have no individuality. Romulus, Remus, and the Colonist are collective beings. The African is an ideal, and Stella an abstraction.

That being said, I have but to confess my pious devotion, which inspired in me the idea to write this book, with which I pay homage to my country.